Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (20 page)

Emma ultimately preferred her furniture tongued and grooved, glued rather than nailed, for the nail had not only fixed Christ’s hands to the Cross, it had driven Eve into labor and a life of grief. Her mother wouldn’t cry over spilled milk, but she would silently curse, her lips retreating from a taste. Emma learned to see the spatter as a demonstration of the laws of nature and as a whimsical arrangement of pale gray-blue splotches. When she read that infants sometimes played with their stools, she knew why.

Maybe her father stopped inspecting her when he saw her watching, simply watching him; when his naked face and naked gaze were gazed at, gazed at like urine in the pot, yellow and pearly; when his hard remarks were heard like chamber music.

He wore boots on account of the manure, he said, though they hadn’t had horses or any other sort of animal in Emma’s time. Except the chickens. The rooster’s crude proud cry rose from the roof of the coop and from the peak of Bishop’s poem. Perhaps it had a line that would do. He’d pull the boots off and leave them on the back porch, where Emma would find his handprints on their dusty sides. The handprints, thought Emma, were nice. There were prehistoric handprints placed in caves. Her father’s boots were four hands high. Maybe five.

As a young girl, Emma had run around barefoot until she began to loathe any part of her that was uncovered, her face and hands first, her feet finally; and she realized her toughened undersoles had little to no sensation. Now her feet were both bony and tender and could feel the floor tremble when the train passed, three fields and one small woods away.

She herself was a residue, her life light as the light in her inherited house. Emma’s mother had died in the bed she had no doubt grown to loathe, a bed full of him every night until her illness drove him out, lying there in a knot, staring up through the dark at death—who would not want it to come quick? Emma wondered whether her mother had ever had a moment of … exultation. Little cruelties cut her down. The rubadubdub of every day’s labor, always going on as long as there was light. Same old cheap china on the table. The same old dust seeping in to shadow the mirrors and coat the sills. The same old rhubarb brought from the patch, the stored carrots and apples and sprouting potatoes. The same unrelenting sun in the summer. Then deep cold and blowing snow. The three of them in different corners of the house. Emma would sit on the floor of her room, reading, her back against a faintly warm radiator, afghan over her knees, squinting at the page through inadequate glasses. She would occasionally hear her mother sweeping or
washing, or the rhythmic treadling of her sewing machine. Her father would be busy with his figures, rearranging, recalculating, hoping to improve the columns’ bleak assessments, since outgo regularly threatened to overtake income. But they sewed their own sacklike dresses; they ate their cold stored root crops; they killed and plucked and cooked their own chickens, though Emma didn’t eat dinner those nights, not since she’d fainted in front of a fistful of freshly withdrawn innards; they scavenged pieces of firewood out of their neighbor’s woods; they picked berries and crabapples and dandelion greens, and jarred elderberry and made apple jelly and canned beans and tomatoes, and even fed the chickens homegrown corn: so what did this outgo come to? Not much, her father allowed. But they were eating from their kitchen garden like squirrels and rabbits, out of the nut-and-berried woods like the deer. The soybeans weren’t fertilized and they couldn’t afford those newfangled chemicals. The only machine still working was her dad’s arms and legs and cursing mouth.

I’ve died too late into your life, her mother said to Emma, who was rocking slowly in the rocker by her bed. Emma wondered what she meant, it sounded like a summing up; but she knew an explanation wouldn’t be agreeable to hear so she didn’t ask for one; she didn’t want to wonder either, but she was haunted by what seemed a sentence of some sort, and kept on wondering. Her rocking was not a rocking really. It was a little nervous jiggle transmitted to the chair. Emma would never have a husband to stare at her body, she had her father for that; she’d never have to do for anybody, never have to sew buttons on a shirt or open her thighs or get him off in time to church. But her
life would be like her mother’s just the same. They’d endure until they died. That would be it. Over the world, as far as she could see, that was it.

The dying had enormous power. Emma wondered whether her mother knew it. Everything the dying said was said “deathbed.” Everything the dying said was an accusation, a summation, a distillation, a confession. “I died too late into your life.” Which was it? confession, distillation, delusion, summation, provocation?

Her mother tried to get God to take her part against her disease, but churchgoing did no good; prayers went as unanswered as most mail; the days came and went and weren’t appreciated. She couldn’t keep anything in her stomach. She was in the bathroom longer than she was in bed. “Maybe I should be like Emma and not eat,” she said. Was it a gift, to have been given a life like that? Close to no one. Never to see delight rise in another’s eyes when they saw you. Dear Heavenly Father, let me suffer a little while longer. Let me linger in this vale of tears and torment. I have potatoes to fork and rinse, windows to wipe, dishes to do, rips to mend.

Her father fell over in a field. Nose down in the dirt. A dog found him.

At his funeral somebody said well, he died with his boots on, and some mourners appeared confounded by the remark, some looked puzzled, and some smiled as much as was seemly, but none of the mourners mourned.

The world was a mist and black figures slowly emerged from the mist as they had in one of the few movies she’d seen, when the townsfolk were burying a family who’d been murdered by the Indians. It was a moist gray day and most people wore a dark coat against the chill. Emma in her horror held herself and stood far away from the hole so she wouldn’t see them lower the
man who’d brought her into the world and made her ashamed to be seen and hacked her ash to bits and cut the heads off chickens and left her a few acres of unkempt land and a dilapidated house. There was a hole in her memory now almost exactly his shape.

Emma sat on the front porch and greeted darkly dressed unaproned women while the men stood about the yard in awkward clumps waiting the decent interval. A few wives had brought casseroles of some kind. Emma never lifted the lids until she realized they’d expect their dishes to be returned. Then she dumped the spoiled contents in the meadow—smelling of mayonnaise and tuna—and wiped the bowls with grass. Forgot about them again. Only to come upon the little collection on a walk a week later. Now she couldn’t remember to whom the bowls belonged. Emma huddled the crockery in a plastic sack and tottered the mile and a half she had to totter to reach the house of a neighbor she knew had brought something, and left the sack on the front steps. They had been trying to be helpful, she supposed, but what a trouble people were.

During the evening the air grew damper. Moonlight and mist, as Bishop wrote, were caught in the thickety woods like lamb’s wool on pasture bushes. Except there was very little moonlight. It was the headlamp of the late train which allowed her to see the fog like gray hair in a comb, but only for a moment before all were gone: woods, fog, trainbeam, lamb’s wool, gray hair, comb.

She sat in the same chair she’d sat in to greet grieving company, sat through an evening in which only the sky cared to snivel, and sat on after they’d left into the deep night’s drizzle, hoping to catch her death; but in the morning when the sun finally got through the fog to find her sitting in the same chair, as fixed as the leaves and flowers burned into the slats of its back, it flooded her cold wet lonely frightened immobile face impersonally, as though she were a bit of broken statue, and moved on
to the pillars of the porch, knurled a bit to be fancy but picked out of a pattern book to be cheap, and then found a grimy windowpane to stain as if the grayed flush of dawn were drawn there. The sun made her open eyes close.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Emma remembered with gratitude that lesson. But she took it a step further. She lost the sense of loss. She learned to ask nothing of the world. She learned to long for nothing. She didn’t require her knives to be sharp. Her knives weren’t her knives anyway. She gave up property. She didn’t demand dawn. When the snow came she didn’t sigh at the thought of shoveling. There was no need for shoveling. Let the snow seal her inside. She’d take her totter about the house instead of the narrow path around the woods. She moved as a draft might from room to room. She ascended and descended the stairs as silently as a smell. Not to keep in trim. Not as if bored, caged, desperate. To visit things and bring them her silent regard.

Emma made her rounds among the mantises. Tending the garden in her teenage days when she’d been put in charge of it, she would find a mantis at its deadly devotions. And she discovered that the mantis rarely ventured far from its holy place.
Mantis religiosa
. It slowly turned the color of its circumstances. There was one on the roof of the shed the shade of a shingle. Another among the squash as green as most weeds. Motionless, she watched the mantis watching, and now Emma understood the difference between its immobility and hers. The mantis was looking for a victim, her father was making his assessments, her mother was doing her chores, while Emma was watching … why? … she was letting the world in; and that could be done, she learned, anywhere, at any time, from any position, any
opening—the circle of the shade’s pull. She ate her fill of the full world.

No wider than a toothpick, a mantis would rest on a leaf so lightly it never stirred from the weight of the insect. The mantis rose and fell as the leaf did, a bit of leaf itself, its eye on the shiny line a little spider was lowering. Emma Bishop rose and fell as well, soft as a shadow shifting across the floor, weightless as a gaze, but as wide as a rug, as good underfoot, as trustworthy in the pot as tea.

Large snowflakes slid slowly out of a gray sky. A lot like a winged seed, they wavered as they came and lit on grass or late leaves still whole and white as doilies. They fell on her hair, clung to an eyelash, melted upon Emma’s extended tongue so a thrill shivered through her and she blushed. She also tottered out in the rain when the rain was warm and fell in fat drops. Her cheeks would run and ears drip. And her hair would very slowly fill with wet, and whiten gradually the way her hair had grayed, till it became a bonnet, not her hair at all. Her outheld hands cooled until, like butterflies did a few times, the crystals lay peacefully on her palms.

Her father found out that, though Emma tended the garden, she didn’t pull weeds or kill bugs. So he removed her from that duty and made her hold the guts he pulled from plucked chickens.

Elizabeth Bishop was a tougher type. She caught fish, for instance, and held their burdened-down bodies out at arm’s length to study the white sea lice which infested them. She lived near water in Nova Scotia and the Keys and hung around fishhouses to note the glistening condition of the fish tubs, coated with herring scales, and the tiny iridescent flies that hover over them. Her father’s slimed-on arm slid out of the cavity, his fist full of the chicken’s life. He didn’t look at Emma. He said: here, hold this. Could she now have enjoyed the mucous
and the membranes, the chocolate and the rufous red of the liver and the … the white patches of fat like small snow on brick. The word was
gizzzzzzzzardzzzs
.

Maybe not. But who had really reached sainthood in this life, and was willing to look on all things with equanimity?

Her totter took her along a lane where she’d dumped the funeral food, and there she found the cookware in an untidy pile like stones. “There’s stillstuffstuck on the sides of the Corning Ware. I don’t care. Leave it there.” The grass grows high at the side of the meadow. Already it’s popping up between them. Let them lie. The life I missed because I was afraid. That’s where we buried him. A dark day. Twilit from dawn to twilight, then at twilight it was night. These dishes remain to be done. His remains, his fists, are encased in a cheap box six feet in the earth, crabgrass over dirt, fog over grass, night sky over fog, blackest space. I’ll take one home this time to soak in the sink. Where my thought of the poet had her sick. I alone know how glorious grime is. Go it alone. God. Go it alone.

I vowed I’d get good at it. Going alonely. Holding the bowl, with blades of grass fastened to its sides where I’d wiped it weeks past, I promised myself a betterment. They were both gone. I was free of ma’s forlorn face, dad’s rage. The house was mine, I reminded myself. And so it could stand nearly free of me. Stand and be. Recognized. Because I relinquished whatever had been mine. My thoughts I let go like lovebirds caged. One dish a day. I’ll return them like pills. There was a nest-shaped dent in the grass where the bowl had lain. What an amazing thing! that such a shape should be at the side of a path between meadow and wood—the basin of a heatproof bowl like a footstep from the funeral.

Emma remembered, in the middle of that moment, while she was making a solemn promise to herself to do better, be better, become none, no one, of the spring day she’d run into the woods
to find bluebells and found instead the dogwood in bloom at the edge of a glade, each petal burned as if by a cigarette exactly as her poet, only that day discovered, had written in a poem, only that day read, in lines only that far reached and realized, before Emma’s eye rose like a frightened fly from the dinner cloth.

So when the bowls were relatively rinsed she stacked them in a string sack, all six, with lids, so she tilted more than normally when she walked so many fields so many meadows to the nearest neighbor, and with a sigh and a sore arm set the sack down on the porch just so, so they’d find them soon enough, some wife and mother named not Nellie no Agatha, was that so? who would no doubt wash them all again and find good homes for them as if they were orphan kids. A tale they’d tell too to the ladies who had lent the dishes to Emma, foisted their food, their indifferent good will, their efforts of affection upon her. Yes, the ladies would laugh at least grin at the way they’d been returned, lumped in one sack like spuds, their pots, after so many weeks of wondering what … what was going on … and would … would they ever get them back.